


Your Own Mountain to Climb

by quixotesque



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angry Sex, Angst, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 10:12:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11311239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quixotesque/pseuds/quixotesque
Summary: It’s been a month and three days since they broke up and it’s been a month and three days of running into each other at a party or a club or a dinner and tumbling into the nearest room they could find.





	Your Own Mountain to Climb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scramjets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scramjets/gifts).



> YOU CAN BLAME CHARLIE PUTH'S 'ATTENTION' FOR THIS, but the title is from Snowmine's 'Let Me In'.
> 
> Many thanks also to Sparrow for her support x

It’s been a month and three days since they broke up and it’s been a month and three days of running into each other at a party or a club or a dinner and tumbling into the nearest room they could find.

Tonight, it’s the alleyway just to the right of Scotty’s bar. Leonard almost trips over Jim’s boots as they pull and push at each other, Jim’s mouth hot and harsh against his and Leonard’s fingers clawing at Jim’s ribs like they’re trying to get right down to the bone.

“You only came because you knew I’d be here too,” Leonard hisses between kisses that taste of spite and anger and sting across his lips. “You just want attention.”

Jim scoffs, tilts his head back and away from Leonard, supercilious, and Leonard wants to drag him in again by the hair. “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re the one who keeps cornering me.”

“I don’t see you walking away.”

“Why would I,” Jim snarls, pressing his hips to Leonard’s in a deliberate, dirty grind, splintery friction sizzling between them. “Sex is as much as I can handle, remember? Isn’t that why you ended things with me? I’m not _emotionally available enough_?”

“You weren’t,” Leonard snaps and shoves Jim back, traps him against the wall, chest to chest, knee to knee. “Don’t act like it’s a crime on my part to want someone who doesn’t shut me out.”

Jim doesn’t lose the arrogance. His full lips brush against Leonard’s as they shape his next attack with deliberate precision: “Like you even gave me enough time. No, you’re too fucking insecure and intent on your own self-preservation for that. Poor Leonard never wants to admit his own role in fucking up his relationships.”

“Shut up,” Leonard replies, a clumsy response but the first within reach when Jim’s just unwittingly conjured up the anxious thoughts that disturb Leonard late at night, the ones that whisper accusingly of how he’d never given Jim—given _them_ —a real chance. How he’d unjustly burned the bridges between them at the first ostensible hint of trouble, an act of self-sabotage that had made Jim into collateral damage.

“Oh, did I touch a nerve?” Jim says and grunts loudly at the teeth Leonard sets to his body again, tugging aside the collar to bite out his frustration across the delicate flutes of Jim’s collarbones. Leonard remembers this shirt—Jim had worn it on their first date and Leonard had thrown it onto the floor beside his bed later that night, punishment for the crime of hiding Jim’s creamy, luscious skin from his starving mouth.

But that was then, when he'd been more inclined towards tenderness with Jim. Now, like wild animals, they fall into a crazed rut, swallowing each other’s groans between the clack of their teeth. Leonard’s cock scrapes against Jim’s through too many layers, makes him shudder like something electrocuted. “You seemed cozy with Mitchell back there and not for the first time either.”

“Jealous?” Jim mocks. His voice has a knife-sharp edge to it that he has never held against Leonard’s throat before. “You hate the idea of me with someone new, Leonard? That what this is about? You trying to make sure I don’t get over you?”

The snarled knot of fury and confusion and desire in Leonard’s chest grows even tighter. It turns him _mean_. “Ain’t this about the time you get down on your knees and put your mouth to good use, Jim?” he spits out, reluctant to accept the sour-tasting envy with which he’d watched as Jim—carelessly, casually gorgeous as ever under the bar’s golden lights—had offered his magnetic smiles to someone else.

Jim’s smile right now is bitter. He laughs, a dark, unhappy sound sharp as the lash of a whip. “Fuck you,” he says and twists them around deftly, forces Leonard’s face up against the wall like this is another one of those bar brawls Jim used to fight once upon a time. “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to fuck you right here in this alley where anybody can walk in on us and find the respectable Dr. McCoy moaning like he can’t get enough.”

“Just your style, Jim. No charm, just vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake, especially if it’s to show off your dick.” Leonard fits an arm between his head and the wall, presses his forehead against it, the other hand joining Jim’s in opening up his jeans, pushing it down to his knees. His cock slaps against his belly, firm and aching, pulsing for attention.

Jim clucks his tongue once he sees bare skin instead of underwear. “No briefs today? Someone was clearly hoping to get lucky.”

Leonard’s face burns even as he says, “You’re the one walking around with lube, Jim. Condom, too, I hope.”

“This might be a surprise, but I haven’t actually fucked anyone aside from you yet, so no, I didn't bother with the condom. No point, if you're gonna be all up on me every time we see each other.”

 _Good_ , Leonard thinks viciously and hates himself for it.

Jim’s breath smears against the back of his neck, burning hot ripples through Leonard’s blood. He hears the tear of plastic and then Jim’s fingers are slippery at his hole, working him open fast and sloppy, and Leonard pushes helplessly into those fingers ‘til they’re tapping against the limit of his patience.

“Fucking do it already,” he growls out, throat husked out by need.

“Never learned to wait, did you,” Jim mutters. His fingers disappear, replaced by the more insistent, urgent press of something larger, hotter. Infinitely more satisfying.

Leonard barely contains a moan. He’s a mass of anticipation, intensely aware of Jim behind him, gripping his hips with intent to bruise and sinking into Leonard, deep, deep, deep, in one seemingly endless slide. “Jim,” he groans out shakily, consumed by the burn and the pleasure that lies beyond it, “Jim, fuck. _Fuck_.”

“God, Bones, you’re so—” But Jim doesn’t finish his sentence.

“So what?” Leonard demands.

“So tight,” Jim says after a heartbeat, “Best ass I’ve ever had,” and Leonard pushes down his disappointment, quickly abandoning the temporary delusion that Jim had intended to say something different.

Jim allows him no reprieve, no moment to adjust, snapping himself into Leonard like it’s his right and slinging an arm around Leonard’s waist to tug him back into the press of Jim’s cock. There’s no space between them, save for the brief moments Jim’s hips move away from Leonard’s ass only to return with each harsh, unforgiving thrust forward.

Leonard’s body knows this. It knows Jim. He tries to spread his legs and arch his back, each clench of his body conspiring to keep Jim trapped snugly inside him. It had always been so easy, so natural, to allow Jim into him like this and now it is only infuriating, a kind of betrayal against himself to still be this responsive to Jim’s touch, rushing to leap and shiver under his fingers, his mouth. For his voice and cock. “Maybe you’re the one making sure I’m never getting over you,” he mutters, more to himself than to Jim, but naturally, Jim hears it.

“I don’t even have to try. Look at you: you’re fucking yourself on my cock as much as I’m fucking you with it. Bet you’d think of me even if you were with someone else.”

Leonard chokes around his own unwillingness to admit it. He turns his head instead, seizes Jim’s terrible, beautiful mouth, and drowns in its taste, the nectar that he’d thought he would have forever to drink from. Jim's hips falter. He slides a hand over to the side of Leonard’s face, holds him close, kisses back deeply, and suddenly, it’s like they had never walked away from each other. Like this is just a mischievous game they’re playing, a thrilling fantasy to satisfy the exhibitionists in them, and they’ll be sneaking off home together at the end of it, laughing, partners in crime.

The illusion is too much to endure. Leonard tears himself away to shatter it and ignores the desperate protest inside him at the loss of Jim’s mouth. “Put more effort in it, give me a fuck that’s actually worth having,” he demands as if his hole isn’t already sore where it’s stretched tight around Jim’s cock.

Jim is relentless and only becomes even more so, driving into Leonard hard enough to force him onto the tips of his toes. It’s torture and bliss all mixed up in a searing tangle and Leonard’s moaning like he can’t get enough, just as Jim said he would, but Jim is the same, fervently whispering, "You're so good, so fucking good, baby," into Leonard’s hair.

The wall is scraping his palm, only Leonard doesn’t care, clutching uselessly at cold brickwork anyway, as the orgasm tightly wired beneath his skin finally breaks loose. It rolls through him, a storm that paralyzes his thoughts and suspends him for long moments between the sharp teeth of pleasure. When it lets go of him, he's left shaking against the wall, breath tumbling out of him choppy and quick.

Vaguely he notes Jim’s teeth biting into his shoulder, a muffled moan as Jim finds his release, jams all of it tightly inside Leonard with one last thrust of his cock. Leonard wishes he could have seen Jim’s face, his lovely, slick, slack mouth and the furrow in his brow like the pleasure’s so good it’s almost pain.

Then he remembers why he didn’t. Then he wonders how they got here. Why they’re doing this to each other. He’s been cleaved open, snapped into disparate pieces by the same hand that could still, even now, stitch him back into one whole shape again, but it won’t. Jim won’t.  

“What are you doing to me,” Leonard whispers.

“Nothing you aren’t doing to me,” Jim says. It sounds like a confession, bared into Leonard’s skin, into the space beneath his jaw, where Jim has fit his face like it’s a warm cranny made just for him. The cage of Jim’s arm is abruptly gentle around Leonard, turned into a cradle all of a sudden.  

Leonard’s still waiting for the thrums fizzing through him to end when Jim carefully pulls himself out, steps back, taking all of his heat along with him and leaving Leonard feeling startlingly cold. Exposed. He _is_ exposed, the wind touching his ass and thighs, his own come and sweat turning cool upon his skin. The wetness Jim has left behind inside him begins to gradually slip out. Shame creeps over him, oily and sickening. He feels like a cheap, dirty thing. He feels _used_.

Awkward with the lingering traces of his orgasm but driven on by humiliation, Leonard tugs his jeans back up, fixing them as best he can. “We need to stop,” he says and breaks the smothering, nauseating silence between them. “You’ve won, Jim. Whatever this is, you’ve won, but it ends now, the way it should’ve ended a month ago.”

Jim says nothing. Does nothing.

Leonard turns to look at him and finds eyes that are unreadable. The moonlight cloaks Jim in ethereal drapes, turning his hair silver, his skin marble-like. He is a statue in front of Leonard, his expression set in stone, cold and untouchable. Remote.

So Leonard walks away. He ignores his weak legs and his throbbing hole. The way his chest is on fire, every breath heavy and hurting as it scrapes through his lungs.

He takes a taxi back to his apartment but hardly registers the journey, his mind remarkably blank, and fumbles at his door for his key with hands that still carry small indents from the wall he’d been fucked against. He drops his chiming phone onto the first horizontal surface he comes across and sheds his clothes one by one on his way to the bathroom.

Under the spray of hot water, Leonard scrubs and scrubs at himself, though every little movement reignites the brand of Jim’s presence inside him and the soap does nothing to erase the marks clawed and bitten into his tender skin. He’ll need time for that and Leonard finds some meager comfort in knowing that Jim will be haunted by bruises of his own.

He drags his wet body out of the shower, makes a half-hearted attempt at drying himself off and then climbs onto his bed, sprawling out gingerly. He closes his eyes. Breathes out and wills the aches to ease.

Minutes later, hours later, he startles out of a forgettable dream and realizes why when the knocking at his door starts up again.

He knows immediately it can only be one person. Knows he can’t open the door. _Shouldn’t_.

But then he hears it—the low, plaintive murmur of, “Bones.”

“Don’t do this, Jim,” he whispers, but already Leonard is on his feet, his self-control crumbling like a fragile house of cards. He makes his way to the door and stares down at the golden handle.

Jim’s voice floats through again. “Bones, can we talk?”

“Haven’t we said everything there is to say?” Leonard replies before he can stop himself.

“I know I haven’t,” Jim says quietly. There’s a very faint sound, like he’s just placed a hand on the door. “Hear me out this one time and after that, whatever we decide, I’ll stick to it.”

"Jim, I don't know."

"Please."

"I meant what I said before. We can't – do what we did again."

"That's not why I'm here. I never wanted to _win_ anything, Bones. I just want to talk, I promise."

Leonard breathes in and turns his slumped figure into something strong and confident. He opens the door just enough and on the other side, Jim’s face is soft, unguarded, that impenetrable expression he’d had in the alley now cracked wide open to reveal something genuine. His hair is more disheveled but he’s still wearing the same clothes, collar open and shamelessly displaying the angry red bruises Leonard had given him. Patiently, he stares at Leonard, who slowly pieces his words together.

“Maybe,” he begins haltingly, "maybe I...also have some things I should’ve said but didn’t.”

“So let’s bring it all out into the open.” Jim smiles sardonically. “You know, the way we should’ve a month ago.”

Leonard’s hand hesitates on the handle. He could say no and close the door and Jim would accept that as final. He’d leave, never to come back, and the next time they'd see each other, it’d be just that—a glance across the room, a small nod of acknowledgement. They would be nothing more than strangers who once knew each other too well and not well enough.

Leonard’s hand hesitates on the handle. Then he pulls the door open wider. He steps aside and lets Jim in.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Your Own Mountain to Climb (Podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12766623) by [Dark_Dreymer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Dreymer/pseuds/Dark_Dreymer)




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